Twitter’s new update focus on the platform’s attention to news

Twitter is where the news of the world breaks for most of us. However, the company itself realises that the platform has been poisoned in parts and needs some fixing. While Twitter promises to be working on that, it still wants you to concentrate on the good parts of the platform.

Last night, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted that the new update “really gets closer to what Twitter wants to be”.In a whole bunch of changes that Twitter has recently announced, the platform is now making it easier for users to follow live news events on the platform, including the ongoing World Cup.

As of now, if you want to follow an event or some news, in particular, you are required to find the relevant accounts, hashtags, or Moments to follow. But with the new update, Twitter is making that easier. You will be able to discover the events and news you want to follow via Explore, Notifications and your Timeline.

This basically means that going forward, you will see breaking news and “personalised news” in tweets that will start popping up at the top of your timeline. You will also be notified of these personalised news tweets, which you will also have the option to turn off. Essentially, based on who you follow, what you tweet, Twitter will personalise certain notifications for you, to keep you in the loop of what you are interested in.

Along with the personalised news, you will also see related news on the top of your search results.

Twitter says that this update will be available in the coming months to everyone in the US on iOS and Android.

Moments to be redesigned as well

With the update, Twitter is also redesigning the way you interact with Moments. Instead of a horizontal layout, Twitter is turning it into a vertical one, for an easier surf through it. And for the US specifically, Moments may have multiple different timelines to swipe through now, for instance, one with tweets you may have missed, another with new tweets, and another with commentary.

Since the new changes have started to roll out, and the biggest event right now is the World Cup, Twitter now has a new dedicated World Cup page, which includes multiple timelines and the current scores right now.

The new Twitter update seems like a visible pivot in the platform’s direction towards being a news app, more than a social media app.

Twitter’s Sriram Krishnan also made that pretty much clear in his recent tweetstorm.